• @yamanii@lemmy.world
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    2311 months ago

    Good to know the industry have been killing their games even before I was born. Great work restoring it.

    • TWeaK
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      1011 months ago

      It’s not exactly killing a game, it was never released outside of Japan - and even there it wasn’t widely purchased.

      The sad thing is the US SNES did actually have a port for this on the bottom, I always wondered what that was for.

      • @TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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        411 months ago

        It’s just as much game killing than any live service today. Satellaview relied on server connection, there’s no official lasting copies that anyone can own.

        • TWeaK
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          111 months ago

          Were they full priced games as well?

          • @TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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            111 months ago

            It was a service, but my point is less how much was paid, but that much of it is dead and gone. A completely free game that shuts down its servers and becomes unplayable is still a loss to our culture.

        • @woelkchen@lemmy.world
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          110 months ago

          there’s no official lasting copies that anyone can own.

          Then Nintendo did a bad job of preserving it. The game could be an expensive eShop download now…

          • @TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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            110 months ago

            As do most live service publishing companies. That is the whole problem. They aren’t bothered by simply looking bad for not preserving them.

      • @yamanii@lemmy.world
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        311 months ago

        It is in the sense that you had to delete the downloaded game to play another, it’s why it’s hard to preserve these satella games.

  • Computerchairgeneral
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    1611 months ago

    Always impressed by the lengths people will go to preserve game history and more than a little concerned about them getting cease-and-desisted by Nintendo. At least it looks like it’s already on the Internet Archive, so that’s good.

  • Deceptichum
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    -611 months ago

    From the sounds of it, the AI wasn’t really necessary for this as the levels could have been recreated manually from watching the footage alone.

    • TWeaK
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      711 months ago

      I disagree, it absolutely was necessary. The AI tool it was based on (Graphite) creates a frame-perfect emulation of control inputs. While it would technically be possible to manually do it, doing so wouldn’t be practicable. Even with the tool, it would take much more effort to actually build the level around the player view, and if they automated that then fair play to them.

      • Deceptichum
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        311 months ago

        You don’t need player inputs to work out the scale and shape of a map.

        • TWeaK
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          411 months ago

          Again, you’re ignoring what is practicable. You could in theory rewrite the game from scratch, but that’s just not practicable.

          • Deceptichum
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            11 months ago

            People manually recreate shit all the time for a hobby.

            And an F-Zero course is far less complicated than say a 1:1 recreation of a city in Minecraft. Shit having those round sprites on the border of the map already give you a perfect staging point for scale.

    • @woelkchen@lemmy.world
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      110 months ago

      levels could have been recreated manually from watching the footage alone.

      The point was to explicitly not just eyeball it but to be as close to pixel perfect as possible. A manual recreation may have been very accurate but certainly not 99.9%.

      Your method would be a remake, this is restoration of the original.